Unlike most nondescriptly sporty thirty-year-olds, Sujit seems strangely unaware both of himself and his surroundings, like an open-eyed, worried sleepwalker. There is a pervasive neutrality about him. His eyes look everywhere and nowhere, dashing from object to object and person to person as if to ensure that things aren’t closing in on him. He looks at people in much the same way that he looks at chairs or lamps; his eyes glide over faces or pause briefly, but rarely make contact. The contorted fingers of his right hand are cupped in his left hand and clasped tightly against his chest in what is frequently described as a “wing” or “chicken” position.

According to workers at the Old People’s Home, he has always held his arms in this position and he is clearly agitated when Clayton takes hold of his hands and lowers them to his sides. “Good boy, Sujit,” she says. “That is how you hold your arms.” His eyes, which have been circling the room in jittery rolling sweeps, drop down to his arms, then settle on Clayton’s face. It is the first time he has made eye contact since entering the room. “Good boy, Sujit,” Clayton says, tapping her finger against his lips and making a rumbling “brmmm... broommm” sound. “That is how you hold your arms, Sujit.” But Sujit doesn’t look convinced. He has the wearily accommodating look of a trained bear, teetering on his back paws, waiting for the stunt to end. He expels a rushed breath through his nose and resumes his shuffling approach to the kitchen counter.

Then he pulls an unexpected move, throwing himself sideways and grabbing a stray banana. The kitchen erupts into chaos as Elizabeth, Mohammed, Linda, and Anna each struggle to separate a fiery and intransigent Sujit from his prize. At the centre of the tempest, Sujit is grimly defiant, his wild eyes trained on the banana he is clutching against his chest. He is clicking his tongue furiously against the inside of his mouth, making the staccato sound that is typically employed in the feeding of birds. He makes this clicking noise, I am told, when he is anticipating food. It seems to point, along with his tucked arms, his now-broken habit of sleeping in a squat, “perching” position, and his impulses to “roost” and to “peck” at his food, at his long-term confinement in a chicken yard.

Elizabeth proposes a compromise: Sujit may keep the banana if he eats it in an orderly, civilized manner, allowing Anna to first peel the fruit, then cut it into pieces. Only a few months ago, Elizabeth explains, Sujit would eat bananas whole and unpeeled, cramming them into his mouth as though rivals, hungry and ruthless, were waiting to pounce. The institutions of cutting and cutlery are still new to Sujit, who ate at the Old People’s Home by tipping his plate onto the floor or mattress, lowering his head, and either “pecking” at his food or hectically filling his mouth with his hands. When he takes his seat at Elizabeth’s counter, a very different routine unfolds, one that nudges the dining experience from the laws of nature to those of culture.

The fork, for Sujit, is just beginning to lose its aura of mystery and menace. Though he has yet to master the practice of targeting items on his plate, he is able to guide the utensil to his mouth if it is handed to him already freighted. The room, as he begins to eat, is maniacally focused on Sujit’s fork, the new frontier of his domestication: Linda’s eyes bulge; Anna wears a plaintive expression; Mohammed’s foreboding smile has settled into straight foreboding; Elizabeth exudes a forceful sense of purpose, something she would have brought to the production of chesterfields and which is now — two years after she sold her business and six years after a thunderbolt-like discovery of Jesus Christ — infused with supernatural vigour and crystallized in the person of Sujit Kumar. We clap our hands encouragingly when he chews a potato slice. Elizabeth’s eyes scan the room like twin lighthouse beams, marking the way to a distant, unknown destination. Her staggering and sometimes robotic determination — a determination that propels the slow, faltering advance of Sujit Kumar’s rebirth — unites maternal and missionary instincts into a single supercharged impulse. Sujit returns to his fork.

Back in the library, next to Norman, I had forged an irresistible conjunction of the chicken man and his bear-boy and wolf-girl precursors. But the moment Kumar walked into the room, with his swirling fragility and his heavy neutral eyes, something happened. I had not expected the chicken man to resolve the enigmas of human nature — to reveal the primeval face of humankind or to unravel the knotted threads of nature and nurture — but I had expected him to disclose something about the feral child as a metaphor for the strained relationship of the human animal to his own animalness, a metaphor for our woozy suspension between the rational and the irrational. But the chicken man, clutching his fork or his banana and rolling his restless eyes, was doggedly literal. I could not see through him to the idea that he was supposed to represent. The history of confinement and abuse that stretched invisibly behind Sujit in the grey light of the Fiji afternoon looked to mean exactly what it literally meant, and nothing more.

The more I thought about Sujit’s years in the chicken yard and his years, his twenty-four years, from eight to thirty-two, in a dark corner of the Old People’s Home, the more inscrutable he became, silent and impenetrable. Is Clayton’s faith that he had been ravaged more by nurture than by nature — by life with chickens rather than mental or physical disability — merely an article of faith? It is a question that shadows most stories of feral children, most famously that of Victor of Aveyron, a case that Clayton came across over thirty years ago as a psychology student and that she now identifies with her own civilizing mission. How would Sujit have looked 200 years ago to an Abbé Bonnaterre or a Dr. Itard, among the first to study “wild” Victor? Would they see a child of nature, a candidate for the tender ministrations of culture and civility or, as Itard’s senior colleagues saw in Victor, an incurable idiot? It was “uncanny,” Elizabeth said, “how exactly 200 years later I am going through an Itard experience; there are so many similarities that it is almost as if I am living the story.” It was uncanny, I thought; but I was thinking more of my own reunion with Victor, the wild child who sent me from an unlikely investigation of feral children to the equally unlikely capital of Fiji. Perhaps Victor would remind me what I was doing in the South Pacific.

On a cold January morning in 1800, a boy of about twelve, naked apart from a ragged shirt, crept out of the woods of the Aveyron district of southern France. He seemed oblivious to the cold as well as to the strangeness of appearing naked out of doors. It was about seven in the morning. The boy passed unnoticed through the deserted streets, stopped at the first garden he found, threw himself to the ground, and began scraping at the soil with long, claw-like fingernails. It was in this posture, feverishly dispatching tuberous vegetables, that the long-nailed, naked trespasser was discovered by the garden’s proprietor, a dyer by profession. The forest boy offered little resistance to his capture.

What the dyer didn’t know is that this nabbing was the third in a series of adventures stretching back to the early months of 1797, when the child was first spotted racing naked through the woods outside the nearby village of Lacaune. The doctor whose fate became entwined with the wild child, Jean-Marc-Gaspard Itard, estimated that the twelve-year-old boy had been abandoned at the age of four or five. The child was a fast runner with a unique, trotting style of locomotion. For most purposes he walked upright, but when hunters or curious villagers got too close, he launched himself forward and scrambled through the woods on all fours. But despite his agility, the forest child was captured in 1797 by a band of savvy woodsmen, who dragged him, flailing violently, into Lacaune. The exotic captive was placed on display in the town square, but his swift, four-legged gait and his horror of confinement soon landed him back in the forest, where he resumed his bucolic diet of acorns, roots, and the occasional stolen turnip. Explosions of laughter were sometimes heard from the woods. Then, in July of 1799, the boy had his second run-in with the villagers of Lacaune. Three hunters caught him after he clambered up a tree for shelter. The villagers installed the boy with a benevolent old widow, who spent the next seven days busily securing her doors and windows against the wild boy’s dreams of flight. On the eighth day he succeeded, heading immediately for the low mountains that separate Lacaune from Aveyron.

A few days after his final arrival in Aveyron, the wild boy, who was normally restrained with a leash, was taken to a nearby field for an experiment. “We let him out this morning in a field next to the orphanage. He took to running on all fours. If we had not followed him closely and overtaken him, he would soon have reached the mountain and disappeared.” The early letters, newspaper notices, and reports on the wild boy are filled with scenes of botched escape, featuring the forest-bound sauvage in the leading role, with a supporting cast of city officials, orphanage employees, doctors, naturalists, and caretakers tearing across open fields and backyards after a short, ungainly, sprinting fugitive: “He got up and ran through the door; despite my cries, he continued to flee so that I had a hard time catching him;” “He has already escaped four or five times from Rodez.” Victor’s affinity with wild animals was particularly evident in his reluctance to substitute his new home for his previous forest arrangement. He wanted to be close not only to the state of wild animals, but to the animals themselves — back in the woods, alone, unsheltered, silent. He seemed to defy the “natural” human impulses toward comfort and sociability: other people were potential providers of food, not of companionship.

When transferred to the orphanage, Victor shunned his fellow wards of the state, as if he belonged to a different species. When he wasn’t eating or sleeping he had the strained, flustered look of someone who is expecting bad news. His only passions were potatoes, acorns, and freedom; the forest had provided all three, the orphanage offered only two. His enthusiasm for the potato and his rustic cooking method, developed during his brief stay in Lacaune, made a lasting impression on all witnesses. In what must have been, for Victor, one continuous action, he tossed the potatoes into the kitchen fire and waited until he could no longer wait. He then plunged his bare hands into the flames, extracted the cooked or partly cooked potatoes and ate them immediately, refusing to let them cool and emitting wild, piercing screams if they were kept from him.

But fire was not the only thing that produced this strange recklessness in the wild boy. During his final months in the Aveyron district, Victor was under the care of a naturalist named Pierre-Joseph Bonnaterre, who concluded that the boy was mysteriously indifferent to extremes of cold and heat. Was the ordinary human sensitivity to cold and heat a “natural” impulse? Might something so basic as an aversion to cold weather or a preference for warm clothes be learned, part of our cultural accommodation? Wondering how the child, with his zeal for roasted vegetables and warm fires, could have endured the cold winters without clothing or shelter, Bonnaterre devised a test:

One evening, when the thermometer was well below freezing, I undressed him completely, and he seemed delighted to get out of his clothes. Then I... led him by the hand down the long corridors to the main door of the Central School. Instead of showing the slightest hesitation about going out, he dragged me out of doors by repeated yanks.

The wild boy’s indifference to cold, Bonnaterre decided, was not incompatible with his evident pleasure in warming himself by the fire, “for one notices that cats and dogs have the same habits.” A few months later the anthropologist J. J. Virey, the first doctor to study Victor in Paris, reached the same puzzling conclusion; the sauvage, he observed, “prefers to be naked, even during the cold of winter.”

About a year after Victor crawled out of the woods of Aveyron, in the dark winter months of 1800, he found himself at the centre of a fierce dispute over his diagnosis. The leading French medical authorities, including Philippe Pinel, the famous director of Paris’s asylums, had been summoned to the Institute for Deaf Mutes to unravel the mystery of the forest child. When the legendary Pinel looked at Victor — a “disgustingly dirty child... who bit and scratched those who opposed him” — he did not see a child of nature but a creature familiar to him from his daily routine in the asylums of Paris; this was no feral child, Pinel pronounced, but an incurable idiot, who had most likely been abandoned in the forest by exasperated parents. He might have been found wandering in the woods but his real home was among the unreasoning and insane, locked in the filthy and overcrowded Bicêtre asylum.